BlueKai Closes Funding Round

GGV Capital Leads Growth Investment in Online Data Leader

Seattle, WA – February 1, 2010 – BlueKai, an intent-focused, auction-based data exchange, today announced it has closed a C round of financing led by GGV Capital (formerly Granite Global Ventures). The round includes investments from existing investors Redpoint Ventures and Battery Ventures.

The company had previously raised a total of $13.7 million in two rounds of funding from Redpoint and Battery. As part of the current funding round, BlueKai added Jeff Richards, Partner at GGV Capital, to its Board of Directors.

BlueKai has built the world's largest exchange of actionable advertising data on-demand for marketers, ad networks or publishers to boost the quality and scale of advertising initiatives. Data buyers include the top 10 US online ad networks, top Internet portals, and agencies and marketers. The world's largest commerce publishers partner with BlueKai to monetize their audience data assets and recognize new revenue streams.

"BlueKai is the data brand of choice for most networks, portals, and demand side platforms and increasingly is required by most agencies to assure they are getting the highest quality audience possible," says Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai. "This round will be used to scale our business by continuing to innovate how data is bought and sold while at the same time driving transparency for consumers. In particular, BlueKai is rapidly deploying new APIs and real time systems that allow networks, demand side platforms and agency trading desks to build the BlueKai marketplace into their own offerings. The result is a vibrant and growing partner ecosystem."

"New Internet advertising models and technologies are launched every day, but few have gotten the traction and marketplace acceptance of BlueKai since its launch just 18 months ago," says Jeff Richards, Partner at GGV Capital. "We've been incredibly impressed with what the BlueKai team has accomplished in a short period of time, building the leading aggregation platform for online intent data and the only auction marketplace for this data."

Source: BlueKai